AlterNet.org: Madeleine Buntinghttps://www.alternet.org/authors/madeleine-bunting
enExposed Literary Fraud Reveals Lengths Americans Take to Deceive Themselves to Justify War and Interventionhttps://www.alternet.org/story/150716/exposed_literary_fraud_reveals_lengths_americans_take_to_deceive_themselves_to_justify_war_and_intervention
<!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Greg Mortenson&#039;s wild Pakistan tale exposes more than just a literary BS artist – it reveals Americans&#039; delusion about their &#039;civilising&#039; mission in Af-Pak.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><div data-global-auto-refresh-switch="on" id="article-wrapper"><div id="article-body-blocks"><p>In the mid-90s an American nurse, Greg Mortenson, was sleeping in his car to save rent so he could fulfil a promise he made to build a school in remote northern Pakistan. Fifteen years later, his book of his epic journey, <a title="Three Cups of Tea" href="http://www.threecupsoftea.com/">Three Cups of Tea</a>, has been in the US bestseller list for more than four years; thousands attend his speaker events; he has raised millions for his charity, and built hundreds of schools in the Gilgit-Baltistan region. His book was top of the reading list for US troops deploying to Afghanistan.</p>
<p>It was an extraordinary story – until this week, when it was dismantled in the US programme 60 Minutes and in an ebook by one of Mortenson's former supporters, Jon Krakauer. Mortenson has admitted to "some omissions and compressions" while largely defending his work. But his myth has <a title="" href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-south-asia-13112799">fallen apart with such astonishing speed</a> that every- one is left wondering how on earth it persisted for so long.</p>
<p>Mortenson's feet of clay expose far more than one fantasist: they also reveal a lot about the naivety of Americans concerning the world and their role in it. No one questioned him too closely, and, more importantly, <a title="Guardian: Greg Mortenson to be sued by tribesmen he said kidnapped him" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/20/greg-mortenson-sued-tribesmen-kidnapped">no one listened closely enough to what the Pakistanis themselves had to say</a>: the unravelling of the Mortenson fable has come as no surprise there. Even in such a highly connected world, some forms of information still don't travel and certainly make no headway against the word of an American hero. Americans swallowed his tale because they wanted to. What empires – particularly those involved in violent conflict – need, above all, is heroes.</p>
<p>Making Mortenson a credible hero means traducing the whole region of Gilgit-Baltistan which, in his script, becomes a wild region of extremist Islamism drawn to violent terrorism. Time and again, he braves personal danger to follow his dream. His big pitch for the last 15 years is that schooling will divert potential terrorists: a "one-man peace mission" in the war on terror. By this account, the insurgency in Afghanistan/Pakistan is not political opposition to foreign intervention but a form of false consciousness inculcated in the madrassas. Get to the child early enough and they will grow up good democrats. It's ludicrously naive given that all the 9/11 bombers were highly educated.</p>
<p>Even more importantly, it has no relevance in Gilgit-Baltistan, which is a peaceful, predominantly Ismaili region whose inhabitants see the Paris-based Aga Khan as their spiritual leader. There is a strong Tibetan Buddhist influence.</p>
<p>Rather than Mortenson waging a lonely battle against ignorance, the <a title="AKDN" href="http://www.akdn.org/">Aga Khan Development Network</a> has been building hundreds of schools in the region and has a track record of staffing them and keeping them open. As the Pakistani journalist, <a title="Guardian: Greg Mortenson's flawed one-man mission in Pakistan" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/apr/21/greg-mortenson-flawed-mission-pakistan">Rina Saeed Khan, points out</a>, Gilgit-Baltistan has one of the highest literacy rates in Pakistan. She asks, quite rightly, why Mortenson didn't join forces with the network given their experience and expertise, instead of struggling desperately to work it all out for himself.</p>
<p>But an American putting money into a foreign-sounding aid foundation doesn't quite have the same marketing appeal as the "one-man mission" line that captures perfectly the boom in DIY aid: a new wave of fledgling agencies driven by individuals frustrated and impatient with bureaucracies and politics, who launch their bid to "make a difference". A myth which turns development into an amateur's hobby.</p>
<p>To every age, their own type of hero: the British empire had Gordon of Khartoum in the 1880s, and the Americans have Mortenson. He is the gentle giant of a man who stumbles into exotic and dangerous locations of which he knows little, and makes friends. This is the innocent abroad – an image of America in the world that is also evident in Mortenson's rival in the New York Times bestseller lists in the last few years, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love.</p>
<p>These hugely popular tales portray a deeply consoling myth of how the US engages with the world as these adventurous individuals wander through foreign climes, and in their expansive, endearing way want only to bring as much delight in their interactions with the locals as they experience themselves. Both books share the personal crisis/failure which is resolved by finding a new self (through a new sense of meaning or love) abroad: in both, the individual's emotional quest is the starting point and provides the narrative thread. These are knowable characters who effectively explain the exotic to home audiences. They offer homely, charming myths for an empire currently embroiled in deadly protracted wars, rather as Rudyard Kipling's fables delighted a previous age of imperialists.</p>
<p>But perhaps the most intriguing – and most serious – aspect of the Mortenson myth is that his "one-man mission to bring peace" is a continuation of a western drive to "civilise" the world. His parents were Lutheran missionaries in Tanzania. Mortenson describes grinding poverty and ancient tribal customs: it's a patronising form of orientalism.</p>
<p>Above all, Mortenson has talked about women's empowerment and his pledge to get girls into schools. Women need liberating from the oppressive tribal patriarchy. There is nothing original here – US foreign policy is now stuffed with the rhetoric of women's rights – but Mortenson has helped popularise one of the most astonishing conundrums: feminism has been co-opted as a rationale for the US war on terror. It dangerously justifies and confirms an American self-righteousness in central Asia.</p>
</div>
</div> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Fri, 22 Apr 2011 13:00:01 -0700Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian666069 at https://www.alternet.orgWorldWorldafghanistangreg mortensonthree cups of teaMen Are Not Hardwired for Infidelity: Why Does Pop Culture Insist on Biological Differences Between the Sexes?https://www.alternet.org/story/148866/men_are_not_hardwired_for_infidelity%3A_why_does_pop_culture_insist_on_biological_differences_between_the_sexes
<!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Grasping after certainty about gender roles has fostered some bad science and stereotyping that harms both sexes.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>Type "men" and "hardwired" into Google and you tap into a wonderfully absurd catalogue of assertions about male behaviour. Men are "hardwired" to cheat, ignore their wives, suspect infidelity, overspend, fail, love money, pursue women and achieve supremacy in the workplace. Meanwhile, women are "hardwired" to worry about their weight and dump cheaters. All include the magic phrase "scientific studies show". It's a snapshot of how science is being used and abused to legitimise gender stereotypes. It would be laughable if it didn't signify how a form of biological determinism -- the claim that differences between men and women have a basis in innate biological characteristics -- has re-emerged and acquired an astonishing popular currency.</p>
<p>This fascination in differences between the sexes is a staple of the self-help industry. John Gray's thesis about planetary confusion (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%20Men_Are_from_Mars,_Women_Are_from_Venus" title="Wikipedia: Men Are From Mars and Women are From Venus">Men Are From Mars and Women are From Venus</a>) has spawned nearly two decades of publishing with guides on everything from communication to food, and all still enjoy warm Amazon reviews and healthy sales.</p>
<p>What's changed in recent years is that the idea of innate biological differences -- for instance in cognitive abilities or communication skills -- has gained academic credibility and powerful champions in widely admired researchers such as Simon Baron Cohen (author of <a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/%20Essential-Difference-Penguin-Press-Science/dp/0141011017" title="Amazon: The Essential Difference">The Essential Difference</a>) and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blank_Slate" title="Wikipedia: The Blank Slate">Steven Pinker</a>. In their wake has followed this boom in scientific studies claiming to find hardwiring for sex differences, and every time they do so, they are guaranteed to accumulate column inches of free publicity. The argument is that breakthroughs in neuroscience, genetics and evolutionary psychology are proving false the feminist consensus of the last 30-odd years that gender is entirely a social construct. The claim is that there are innate differences, and they go part of the way in explaining why men and women have such different lives.</p>
<p>Nonsense, retort a number of prominent women academics who have been trying to fight back in the US and the UK. A new book, <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2271666/" title="Slate: The Last Word on Fetal T">Brainstorm</a>, by Rebecca Jordan-Young exhaustively analyses every relevant study on hormonal sex differentiation of the human brain, and argues that they are riddled with weaknesses, inconsistencies and ambiguity. It's a clarion call for better science on the subject.</p>
<p>Jordan-Young's call is echoed in the UK by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deborah_Cameron_%28linguist%29" title="Wikipedia: Deborah Cameron (linguist)">Deborah Cameron</a>, an Oxford professor of language and communication. She takes issue with one of the central claims that women have superior verbal abilities; some speculate that this is linked to brain structure, others that it has an evolutionary explanation. Cameron sees both as purely speculative, and insists that explanations of difference must take account of three much more prosaic factors.</p>
<p>First, that verbal behaviour is linked to "activity type" -- what someone usually spends much of their time doing. If that activity type is looking after small children or repairing drains, it will affect how they use language. Second, verbal differences reflect differences in power and status. Contrary to the commonplace assumption that women speak more, there is now mountains of evidence, claims Cameron, that where status is not a factor there is no difference between men and women; where status does matter -- such as office meetings -- men talk much more than women.</p>
<p>Finally, Cameron argues that we use language to project our identity -- much like our choice of clothing -- to distinguish our sense of who we are in terms of class, life role as well as gender, and all of these identities are socially constructed. Factor out these variables, and you're left with no clearcut differences in how men and women use language.</p>
<p>Or take another central pillar of the new biological determinism which asserts that men and women have different cognitive capabilities. <a href="http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/debate05/debate05_index.html" title="Edge: THE SCIENCE OF GENDER AND SCIENCE PINKER VS. SPELKE">Professor Elizabeth Spelke</a> has spent her academic career looking at cognitive development in infants, and concludes: "All this research supports the startlingly boring conclusion that there are no significant differences between men and women's cognitive abilities."</p>
<p>A tiny number of tests show sex differences. One of these (famously used to argue that men are better at engineering and other sciences) is a test comparing two shapes. Men are slightly more likely to use a method known as mental rotation, despite it being rather less efficient. Overall, in 45 items in the test, only three show sex difference, two of them favour girls and only this aspect of mental rotation favours boys. Spelke is astonished as to why this slight difference favouring boys has attracted such disproportionate attention.</p>
<p>But if the evidence for biologically innate differences is so flimsy and full of conjecture, why does it continue to have such a hold on the imagination -- in bestselling self-help books and among brilliant, respected scientists? Cameron suggests that this grasping after certainty about gender roles is a response to anxiety. There has been, and still is, rapid social change around the roles and opportunities of men and women.</p>
<p>Cameron adds that a lot of the debate around differing communication skills seems rooted in a rise in conflict between the sexes. "My parents never had an argument about whose career came first or who should do the washing up, but now everything is up for grabs." Without clearly differentiated roles, men and women are competing over the same things: job status, time with the children, who's going to do the housework -- which makes harmonious communication difficult, so people look around for explanations.</p>
<p>Spelke adds another intriguing dimension to the sustained popularity of forms of biological determinism. Her most recent research devised tests which showed that children as young as three begin to categorise the world by gender. Work she is doing indicates this could begin to develop even earlier -- at 10 months. Interestingly, the same process of categorisation in infants is not evident when it comes to race. "We are predisposed to see the social landscape in terms of gender," says Spelke.</p>
<p>She thinks it's possible that it served some adaptive purpose in our evolution, but that actually gender is a very bad indicator of behaviour because there is so much variability within each sex. For instance, if one man likes bananas, that is no reason to assume another does. To Spelke, this predisposition means the debate about the differences between men and women will never reach a settled conclusion. We keep on looking for differences because that is one of the basic ways we order our experience of the world. That doesn't mean change isn't possible, just that the argument will carry on getting sidetracked to focus on tiny differences rather than the much greater similarities.</p>
<p>Good science will challenge the tendency to stereotype. The danger though is what Cameron refers to as "stereotype threat". If you tell women that women do less well in a maths test, they will do less well, confirming the claim. Don't tell them, and they do better. Stereotypes are dangerous; they become self-fulfilling and can generate discrimination. Cameron points to interviews with call-centre managers who were discriminating against hiring men on their assumption that women were better at empathising. So beware a popular mythology of hardwiring that can result in some very concrete -- and pernicious -- outcomes.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->Madeleine Bunting is a Guardian columnist and associate editor. She writes on a wide range of subjects including politics, work, Islam, science and ethics, development, women's issues and social change. </div></div></div>Mon, 15 Nov 2010 10:00:01 -0800Madeleine Bunting, Comment Is Free664587 at https://www.alternet.orgLGBTQLGBTQCultureSex & Relationshipssexgenderwomensciencemensex differencesAre the 'New Atheists' Actually Doing Anything to Stop the Ills of Religion?https://www.alternet.org/story/146343/are_the_%27new_atheists%27_actually_doing_anything_to_stop_the_ills_of_religion
<!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Is the New Atheism just a publishing phenomenon? What have all these books, these tons of paper and felled forests achieved?</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter--><p>One shelf of my bookcase is now groaning under the weight of its contents. It's the God slot, and in the years since the publication of Richard Dawkins's <em>The God Delusion</em> in 2006 and Christopher Hitchens's<em>God Is Not Great</em> in 2007, there has been an addition every few weeks from enraged philosophers, theologians, historians and journalists, all trying to convince readers of the shoddiness of the New Atheists. Peter Hitchens's <em>Rage Against God</em> was the latest arrival last week.</p>
<p>So with Easter done and the Catholic church embroiled in one of the most shaming and tumultuous periods of its history, it seems an appropriate moment to reckon on the progress of New Atheism, and take stock of this curious and – in the early 2000s entirely unpredictable – publishing phenomenon. What have all these books, these tons of paper and felled forests achieved?</p>
<p>Well, the most obvious achievement has been a lot of sore heads. Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens convey the fury of Old Testament prophets, while their opponents struggle in various well-mannered ways to contain theirs. From my rough survey I would suggest those with philosophical training are the most irritated by New Atheism, while the journalists seem to enjoy the opportunities the row provides; Peter Hitchens explicitly does the "in sorrow not in anger" approach. What staggers the "philosophers" (I use the term loosely to indicate writers who use philosophical arguments) is the sheer philosophical illiteracy of Dawkins. As Terry Eagleton puts it in <a title="" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; border-collapse: collapse; background-repeat: no-repeat; color: rgb(0, 86, 137); text-decoration: none;" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/04/john-micklethwait-adrian-wooldridge-review">Reason, Faith and Revolution</a>, "Dawkins's rationalist complacency is of just the sort Jonathan Swift so magnificently savaged". Several centuries on, it appears some have not quite grasped Swift's point.</p>
<p>Faced with such ignorance of centuries of philosophical thought, there are two options. Either start from the beginning – Charles Taylor's 800-page A Secular Age or Karen Armstrong's speed history of western thought, The Case for God – or go for clever brevity, elegantly skewering the argument in the style of Eagleton or John Cornwell's Darwin's Angel. The problem with both genres is they don't offer the kind of bestselling strident certainty that brought Dawkins such handsome financial rewards.</p>
<p>But perhaps New Atheism's publishing success is a case of winning a battle and losing the war. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge point out in God is Back that the main religions are currently experiencing massive expansion across most of the world. One of the biggest drivers of growth is China; by 2050 it could be the biggest Muslim nation, and the biggest Christian one. What numerous countries are now demonstrating from the US to Asia, from Africa to the Middle East and Latin America, is that modernisation, far from entailing secularisation, is actually leading to increased and intensified forms of religiosity. According to Micklethwait and Wooldridge, the future across most of the globe is going to be very religious.</p>
<p>To the sceptical European, this is a lonely and unintelligible prospect. So, scanning my stuffed bookshelf, which of these defenses of God are going to help explain this enduring appeal? Start with <a title="" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; border-collapse: collapse; background-repeat: no-repeat; color: rgb(0, 86, 137); text-decoration: none;" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/may/27/highereducation.news">Karen Armstrong's A Short History of Myth</a>: "we are meaning-seeking creatures" who "invent stories to place our lives in a larger setting … and give us a sense that, against all the depressing and chaotic evidence to the contrary, life has meaning and value". That helps explain why the bestselling religious book in the US is The Purpose Driven Life (the first chapters of which are published on the net as <a title="" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; border-collapse: collapse; background-repeat: no-repeat; color: rgb(0, 86, 137); text-decoration: none;" href="http://www.purposedrivenlife.com/en-US/AboutUs/AboutTheBook/FirstSevenChapters.htm">What on Earth Am I Here For?</a>). The faithful are not mugging up on critiques of reason for an argument with New Atheism, but turning to religion to offer meaning and purpose.</p>
<p>The great mistake the atheists made is to claim that religion started out as a clumsy stab at science – trying to explain how the world worked – and is now clearly redundant. That misses the point entirely: religion is not about explaining how an earthquake or flood happens; rather it offers meanings for such events. When someone is killed in a car accident, western rationality is good at analysing how the brakes failed and the road curved, but has nothing to say about why, on that particular day, the brakes failed when it was you in the car: the sequence of random events that kill. This search for meaning is part of what drives the religious spirit.</p>
<p>Armstrong distinguishes between two capabilities of the human brain: mythos and logos. The latter is rational, logical; the former generates the mythology "which often springs from profound anxiety about essentially practical problems which cannot be assuaged by purely logical arguments". Death is central to all human mythologies.</p>
<p>The second mistake made by the atheists is the assumption that faith and belief are mental processes akin to opinion. Armstrong runs through the etymology to uncover original meanings: belief is a commitment not a proposition; faith, as in "I have faith in you", is an expression of confidence, not an assertion of the existence of something. Dogma is "a truth which cannot easily be put into words and which can only be fully understood through long experience" – rather like the love of a parent for their child growing into adulthood.</p>
<p>The loss of the original meanings of all these words show how religious faith in the west came to be interpreted as a matter of the head and the intellect, and was bound up with the authority of an institution which expected submission: God was regarded as something to think about rather than do in large chunks of western religious practice which, preoccupied with institutional power, ended up in this current cul de sac. (Alastair Campbell's use of the verb in "we don't do God" is actually cutting-edge theology of a practice of love, service of others, search for justice.)</p>
<p>Armstrong offers an important insight into the sheer aggressive intolerance of New Atheism when she argues that "the history of religion shows that, once a myth ceases to give people intimations of transcendence, it becomes abhorrent". The shift to monotheism provoked huge struggle among the Israelites, for example, and a deep contempt for anything that might be idolatry. The New Atheists might demonstrate this, suggests Armstrong; Dawkins is rejecting a particular conception of God, the God of a literal reading of the Bible who made the world in six days. What Dawkins would not be aware of (he is proud of never having read any theology) is that he shares this position with prominent 20th-century theologians such as <a title="" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; border-collapse: collapse; background-repeat: no-repeat; color: rgb(0, 86, 137); text-decoration: none;" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tillich">Paul Tillich</a>, who rejected this kind of belief as tantamount to idolatry. So New Atheism could be read as a violent reaction against a corrupted mythology in need of renewal.</p>
<p>The paradox of New Atheism is that in its bid to make religion unacceptable, it has contributed to making it a subject that is considered worth talking about again. As Micklethwait and Wooldridge point out, in the US there are now hundreds of thinktanks, institutes and courses dedicated to the subject. Any visitor to <a title="" style="padding: 0px; margin: 0px; border-collapse: collapse; background-repeat: no-repeat; color: rgb(0, 86, 137); text-decoration: none;" href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree">Comment is Free</a> is aware of how religion attracts a huge number of posts; literary festivals routinely offer several sessions on religion. Books are churned out. Admittedly the debate can be horribly bad tempered and it is in as much danger of spreading intolerance as it is of enlightenment, but God hasn't attracted this quantity or intensity of debate for decades.</p> <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Wed, 07 Apr 2010 21:00:01 -0700Madeleine Bunting, Comment Is Free661740 at https://www.alternet.orgBeliefBeliefreligionhitchensdawkinschristianityatheismheavenhellafterlifeWillful Ignorance: Who Will Face the Music for the Horrors Unleashed in Iraq?https://www.alternet.org/story/67011/willful_ignorance%3A_who_will_face_the_music_for_the_horrors_unleashed_in_iraq
<!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">The Iraq war is an abject failure of democracy: governments have not been held accountable for their criminality.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->"You think you are innocent, but you're not," said the British Muslim suicide bomber in the Channel 4 television drama Britz last week. As the compelling actor Manjinder Virk recited her suicide statement to camera, she went on: thousands of women and children are dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet the governments responsible have been returned to power.<br /><br />Her assertion sticks in the mind because it goes straight to the heart of how we choose to forget, choose not to understand; and how from such choices it becomes possible to imagine our innocence.<br /><br />That's not to say that her own moral choices were defensible - she blew up herself, her beloved brother, fellow Muslims and plenty of women in the crowd - but the challenge even from such a morally flawed character persists. Can we claim innocence of the chaotic violence of Iraq now normalised into the background of our lives? Suicide bombs have long since become routine radio noise. We're numbed to the atrocities; except for some stalwarts, the initial anti-war activism has been crowded out by other responsibilities. Life goes on, even if in Baghdad it frequently doesn't.<br /><br />And to accompany the indifference is the creeping denial of responsibility. Government ministers now talk of Iraq as a tragedy, as if it was a natural disaster and they had no hand in its making. There's a public revulsion at the violent sectarian struggles best summed up as "a plague on all their houses," as even the horror gives way to exhaustion.<br /><br />The irony is that in this great age of communications and saturation media, this is perhaps the most important war to become nigh on impossible to report. Unless the reporter is embedded with the occupation forces, it takes either terrifying courage or extraordinary ingenuity to bring images to our screens of those caught up in the awful maelstrom of this imploded country. Without the human stories that bring people and their suffering so vividly to life, there is little chance of public opinion re-engaging with the biggest political calamity of our time.<br /><br />The Iraq war represents the end of the media as a major actor in war. In Bosnia journalists stirred western Europe's conscience with their vivid accounts; these were people we came to understand, recognise and empathise with, and public opinion forced recalcitrant governments to take note and act. It was a lesson not lost on the Kosovans: they ensured the media saw every atrocity, and the coverage was used to secure a comparable outcome to Bosnia - western governments were forced to act. But in Iraq the number of journalists killed (now at least 138) means that this war is near private - the images and people who might make the horror of this war real don't reach our screens. It's no longer a war that is accessible to public scrutiny or to democratic engagement.<br /><br />It may have been Iraqi suspicion of western media that ensured this outcome, but it's one that serves US interests nicely. The indifference, the exhaustion and the difficulty of reporting leaves the US forces with arguably a freer hand than they have had in any field of operations for decades. While the Americans and the British keep trying to persuade their public that the war is over - a habit initiated by George Bush himself when he announced his pyrrhic victory on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf in May 2003 - they can carry on fighting it. And there are plenty of people only too eager to hope their political leaders are right and that the whole problem of a country they never knew much about just goes away.<br /><br />All of which makes the achievement of the few who do break through this news blackout all the more remarkable - Ghaith Abdul-Ahad on this paper, and the Guardian's Emmy-winning film made by an Iraqi doctor on his Baghdad hospital, for example. This week a book is published by another: Dahr Jamail was a mountain guide in Alaska in 2003 who began to take an interest in US foreign policy and ended up picking up his backpack and swapping American mountains for Baghdad and Falluja, driven by a fierce moral imperative that "as a US citizen he was complicit in the devastation of Iraq." After more than three years of reporting he has post-traumatic stress disorder, but has not lost his conviction that "if the people of the United States had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq, the occupation would already have ended."<br /><br />What is chilling about Jamail's accounts is the routine destructiveness of the US forces; how they demolish nearby homes after a roadside bomb, leave unexploded munitions in the fields of farmers who don't give information, bulldoze orchards. Livelihoods destroyed, families displaced every day, incubating hatred. One of the worst episodes occurred when Jamail's friend was caught by chance at prayer time in a mosque when worshippers were shot dead, with children trapped in the mayhem: a holy place desecrated in a US operation. We may know nothing of such routine details of the prosecution of this war, but these are the stories filling the Arabic media. Across the Muslim world they are taken as irrefutable evidence of the humiliation and persecution of their Islamic faith. We can only pretend we don't understand.<br /><br />In the meantime, the biggest human displacement crisis in the Middle East for 60 years is unfolding, the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world. One in six Iraqis has now been displaced, 60,000 a month are leaving the country, spilling into Syria (1.4 million) and Jordan (750,000). In an uncanny magnification of our own anxieties about migration and the strain on public services, the capacities of these two Middle Eastern countries to educate thousands of traumatised children or provide basic healthcare have been swamped. The UN's budget for refugees in Syria for 2007 is $700,000 - less than a dollar per person. But this crisis offers no telegenic vistas - people are crammed into the apartments of friends rather than tents on a windy African plain. So it gets even less attention.<br /><br />Of these millions, Britain confirmed last week that it will take just 500 refugees with a record of having worked for British forces. It drags its feet over offering any more assistance for dispersal, despite requests from the UN; of 123 from Jordan whom the UN have allocated to Britain on tight criteria of having relatives in this country to provide for them, we have so far accepted only three. Britain washes its hands of the consequences of its invasion with the US. There's a horrible contradiction here: those in power accept no responsibility. Those who might have a sense of responsibility feel utterly powerless.<br /><br />It can take a generation or more for people to grasp the significance and magnitude of historical events. Facts that are infinitely more bizarre and awful than fiction - as Naomi Klein's book The Shock Doctrine documents - take a long time to be fully absorbed. The Iraq war has been about the abject failure of democracy: governments have not been held to account for a war that has squandered lives, billions in public money and the stability of an entire region with reckless criminality. <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Tue, 06 Nov 2007 03:00:01 -0800Madeleine Bunting, Comment Is Free642376 at https://www.alternet.orgMediaWorldMediaForeignPolicybushmediairaqdahr jamailnew labourDoes Our Planet Have Too Many People?https://www.alternet.org/story/62157/does_our_planet_have_too_many_people
<!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-teaser field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even">Reducing consumption is imperative, but it&#039;s pointless to cut out meat and cars while having lots of children.</div></div></div><!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-story-image field-type-image field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><img typeof="foaf:Image" src="https://www.alternet.org/sites/default/files/styles/story_image/public/story_images/default.jpg?itok=wQcwl0WS" alt="" /></div></div></div><!-- BODY -->
<!--smart_paging_autop_filter-->It's the one issue no environmentalist organisation wants to talk about. Population. Thirty years ago, when international concern first began to mobilize about the planet's future, it was the pre-eminent question, but now you're hard put to get a straight answer. Does the UK need population management? Does the world need it?<br /><br />This is one of those issues that is regarded by many privately as common sense but rarely gets a public airing. Of the environmental organizations I managed to contact, all acknowledged that it was frequently brought up by the public in meetings and letters. Yet all said they did not campaign on the subject and had no position on it. It seems that there is a worrying disconnect between a generally accepted consensus among those who shape the national conversation about the environment and their audiences, who either are much less certain or believe that, if the planet's resources are being grossly depleted, there are just too many of us about.<br /><br />Too many people. That is certainly the impression from studying the maps published this week by the Campaign to Protect Rural England, which chart how fast the areas of the country undisturbed by urban development, roads or other noise are disappearing. Since the 60s, whole chunks of England have been broken up into small fragments, absorbed into a dense network of towns, cities and major roads.<br /><br />The maps reinforce what people experience. You try getting away from it all in England, and you are tangled in traffic jams, shoe-horned into campsites, followed by the whine of motor-bikes and the roar of traffic even up on the hills. We live in a crowded island - a truth that it has become unacceptable to acknowledge because of the unpleasant associations it brings with it.<br /><br />But England is now the second most densely populated country in Europe, after Belgium, and at current rates of increase it could be second only to Bangladesh in the world by 2074. There are those who argue that there's no need for alarm, and that we can concentrate development in <a href="http://www.uklanddirectory.org.uk/brownfield.asp">brownfield sites</a> to accommodate all the millions of extra homes needed. But how many more people can you squeeze into cities that already seem to be choking under the weight of their population density - the buses and trains packed, the streets clogged and the parks on a Sunday afternoon teeming with people.<br /><br />It's not surprising that environmental organizations fight shy of getting into this subject. It embroils them in a host of deeply emotive and difficult debates. Immigration for one. Most of the UK population growth in the next few decades will be attributable to immigration. Should we have a balanced migration policy with a net zero increase? Given how many British-born are emigrating to Australia, the US, Spain and France, it would still allow us to maintain our international responsibilities to provide asylum. But it wouldn't allow us to absorb the same quantities of cheap east European labor that have subsidized our economic growth.<br /><br />Population management is just as emotive. People quickly bristle at the idea of any government telling them how many children they can have. The whole policy area of population was given a bad name by India's enthusiasm in the 70s and 80s when government programs ensnared uncomprehending young men into having vasectomies. But should the UK government pursue a policy of persuasion, a Stop at Two campaign, to bring people's attention to the carbon footprint of having lots of children? If it did, would it work? Internationally, population policy has been crippled by US and Vatican opposition on abortion and contraception. Have they managed to bully environmental organisations into this awkward silence?<br /><br />When challenged, environmentalists have coherent arguments to defend their retreat from the population debate. They insist that the pressure on the earth's resources - its water, forests, soil fertility - and carbon emissions are all about consumption and lifestyle, not about sheer numbers of human beings. They rightly point out that the average American produces some 20 tonnes of carbon a year while some of those living in areas of the world with the fastest growing populations, such as Africa, produce a tiny fraction of that kind of carbon footprint. They insist that the earth can support the 9 billion now predicted by 2050 (the increase in the next 40 years will equate to roughly what the entire global population was in 1950) if everyone is living sustainable lifestyles. The focus of campaigning must stay on the consumption patterns of the developed world, rather than on numbers of people.<br /><br />But there is growing disquiet that it's not an either/or. As the environment finally gets the prominence it deserves, some environmentalists are prepared to assert that population management has to be on the agenda. Christopher Rapley, the director of the Science Museum, has spoken out on the subject; Jonathon Porritt, chair of the government's Sustainability Development Commission, admits it is "tough territory" but argues that "it is intellectually unjustifiable" for the environmental movement not to address it. He wants to see a UK population policy that covers both family planning and immigration, aimed at long-term population decline. That would mark a dramatic shift in policy. In particular, he rejects the oft-cited need to keep up the birth rate to pay for pensions. But his attempts to get the government to engage have got nowhere.<br /><br />As Porritt ruefully admits, his position lands him in some unsavory company. The Optimum Population Trust proposes some batty ideas such as government campaigns on the unattractiveness of parenthood. And it gets much worse. As is often the case where there is a disconnect between public debate and popular sentiment, the British National Party (BNP) is stepping in to grab the territory. It argues that "our countryside is vanishing beneath a tidal wave of concrete," "immigration is creating an environmental disaster" and Britain could become "a tarmac desert."<br /><br />The BNP is peddling alarmist nonsense. Only 8% of the land of this country is built on, but, as a Mori poll commissioned for Kate Barker's review of land use for the Treasury showed, it doesn't feel like that: those polled put the figure at 50%. This sense of crowdedness and the resentment it can generate needs a grown-up debate. That means talking about consumption patterns and population numbers. It includes pointing out that consumer trends - such as our taste for mobility, the move to smaller households and multiple bathrooms - squeeze the space and resources we share on a small island. But it would also include discussion of the environmental impacts of migration and family size. There's no point giving up your meat and your car, recycling your rubbish and producing lots of children. The challenge is to have that debate while steering well clear of racism - or of the authoritarianism that lurks in the background of environmentalism. <!-- All divs have been put onto one line because of whitespace issues when rendered inline in browsers -->
<div class="field field-name-field-bio field-type-text-long field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"> <!--smart_paging_autop_filter--> </div></div></div>Tue, 11 Sep 2007 21:00:01 -0700Madeleine Bunting, Comment Is Free641398 at https://www.alternet.orgEnvironmentEnvironmentenvironmentpopulation